The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series)

by Harry Bingham

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘One third. Always one third.’

  I see, or think I do, Burnett supressing an inner smile, and I probably do the same.

  I mean, fuck me, the idiocy of these people. What was Nugent’s role, really? He probably thought he was the king of implementation, but he wasn’t, not really. He was the fall guy. The guy all set up to get the life sentence when, eventually, inevitably, this whole thing unravelled. He’ll have plenty of time to reflect on the wisdom of his decision-making in the time to come.

  ‘This man, Jones. You met him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Once, or on multiple occasions?’

  ‘Five or six times, perhaps.’

  ‘So you would be able to make a visual identification?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Burnett’s yellowish grin expands. Wolfish. He glances behind him at the mirrored wall, where Watkins will even now be taking up position. Watching, enjoying, hoping.

  Burnett steps back. Nugent sees, for the first time, the big wad of pictures in my hand.

  ‘Photo time,’ says Burnett. ‘It’s photo time.’

  49

  Endings.

  Endings or, rather, moments that end one thing and start another, new hares leaping off in new directions, starting new lives, bounding away across the frosty turf into a sunlight that’s made new every day.

  We don’t have our convictions yet, but we will. We’ve handed our case over to the Crown Prosecution Service now. There’s still to-ing and fro-ing over points of detail, but the ship is steaming from our waters to theirs. Won’t require us again, not in essence, till Burnett and I are called upon to stand in court and give witness to all that we saw and said and did.

  Nugent lived up to his promise.

  He gave us his everything, no ifs, buts or exceptions.

  Much of his story came to nothing at all. ‘John Jones’ – as I expected, as Watkins too half-expected – proved to have been exceptionally thorough in his camouflage. He seldom met Nugent, and then mostly in the first years of the operation. According to Nugent, the two men hadn’t met once in the last four years. When they did meet – in neutral locations in and around London – Jones seems to have arrived by taxi or public transport. Certainly used no vehicle that we’ve been able to trace. The locations chosen were well away from any CCTV and, given the density of cameras in London, we have to assume the meeting spots were carefully screened beforehand. Most of the business conducted by the two men was handled by phone. Always from Jones to Nugent, never the other way round. Jones’s calls came via mobile phones, unregistered pay-as-you-go cheapies that changed repeatedly. The calls were made from random locations across South Wales, London, and England south of Manchester.

  If we had nothing else to go on, we’d have to admit that Jones had got away with it. Left no trace. Vanished.

  But, from the moment we identified Alina Mishchenko, I felt the prick of gathering excitement. The excitement of a hunter coming upon the signs of fresh spoor.

  Broken grasses and new dung gleaming in the dimness.

  In this case, the spoor I wanted was anything that suggested that the Mishchenko case might – just might – be part and parcel of our own beloved Operation April.

  Clues so dim to start with, but gathering in intensity the further we proceeded.

  The first clue was Alina Mischenko herself. The April gang is interested only in money, and lots of it. A corpse in a churchyard – that in itself didn’t shout ‘April’ at all. But a millionairess dead in a churchyard? A millionairess fifteen hundred miles, and a whole world of experience, removed from the place she ought to be?

  That strangely out-of-place corpse murmured that money was somehow caught up in whatever dark roads led her to that place. And if money was present, then some connection to April couldn’t quite be ruled out.

  At that stage, that one winking lamp couldn’t be trusted enough for us to be sure of anything. Not enough for us even to voice the hypothesis.

  But the further we went, the more those little lamps lit up.

  How many criminal gangs have the financial sophistication to read complex business accounts? Almost none, but we know for a fact that the men behind Operation April do have sophistication on that scale.

  How many criminal gangs can set up those Cayman Islands bank accounts and all the rest of it? Set them up so well that no trace of those kidnap payments ever so much as raised a murmur with our money-laundering guys? Those things might sound easy, but it takes top-dollar expertise to do them well. Expertise that, again, we know the April people to have in abundance.

  Even so, April was a long shot. If this kidnap ring had its bosses in London, then there’d be any number of gangs with the required expertise. If, on the other hand, the ring had its base in Wales, a place where sophisticated organised crime is all but unknown, the odds would improve dramatically in our favour.

  If, if, if.

  Speculation without evidence.

  A guess running far ahead of any proof.

  But both Watkins and I saw the same few lamps lighting up one by one. Hoped against hope that the odds would shake out in our favour. Twice, Watkins almost breathed her suspicions to me, holding back only because she didn’t want to re-light the flames of my obsession.

  But we both knew what we wanted and – as I laid out my photos, under Burnett’s gun-slit eyes and the steel of Watkins’s gaze behind that mirrored wall – we both knew what we hoped to achieve.

  Hope against hope.

  An evidential coin-flip.

  First, I laid out a succession of prints taken from Dyfed-Powys’s own database of crooks. A database that, give or take a bit of rural Welshness, looks like any other crooks’ gallery in the land.

  Impatiently, Nugent said, ‘No, no,’ brushing them aside, with a gesture of annoyance.

  He wanted to describe the individual. Give us an e-fit. But with Watkins silently watching behind the mirrored glass, with the video camera still winking red in the corner, I stick to the plan we agreed beforehand.

  Next I spread out some Cardiff crooks. The narrow-eyed, strong-jawed, shaven-headed twenty- and thirty-somethings that our courts and prisons are full of.

  ‘No, no. Not these. None of these.’

  Again, he wants to start describing the man. Again, I stop him.

  This time, though, I lay out a bunch of different photographs. White-collar types. Professional. Suit and tie, or the sort of casual clothes that mutter money.

  The photos are different in another way too. The first couple of sets were mostly mugshots. The kind of things that are taken when someone is taken into custody. Blank wall behind. The glare of a too-bright flash. The unnatural faces of people who are being told what to do and how to do it by a bevy of custody officers.

  The photos I’m laying out now are more ordinary. Not quite family snaps, perhaps – no dogs on beaches, no kids with ice cream – but informal. Journalistic. Men on street corners. Guys making phone calls outside coffee shops.

  Nugent goes carefully now. Slower.

  His dismissals are still confident. ‘No. No. Not him.’ But he takes his time. Sits forward as he sifts the pictures.

  And, one by one, I slip the photos of our Operation April targets into the flow.

  Brendan Rattigan: no.

  Galton Evans: no.

  Owain Owen: no.

  Nick Davison: no.

  David Marr-Phillips: no.

  But then I lay another picture on the table. Ben Rossiter. Part of our B-list. Attached to the gang, we think, but maybe second string only.

  The shot was taken by one of our surveillance guys. Rossiter stepping into a silver Aston Martin. It’s raining slightly, and Rossiter is slipping off a waxed jacket even as he swivels for the car seat. There’s nothing much to read on his face. Just a successful, wealthy man, slightly irritated by the rain.

  ‘That’s him. That’s
Jones. The man I worked with.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Positive. One hundred per cent.’

  ‘Do you want to see more photos?’

  ‘No.’

  I show them anyway. More photos of random white-collar types. More photos of Rossiter. Taken on different dates, at different times of day, with the subject in different poses, wearing different clothes.

  Nugent picks the right guy out every time.

  ‘Look, it’s him. I know the man, OK?’

  That’s hardly true. Nugent knew nothing about the guy, not even his name. But the visual match is, for now, sufficient. I push Nugent to look at five hundred photos in all. Of those, just six are of Rossiter. He picks out the six with confidence on each occasion.

  When we’ve gone through my stack, I ask Nugent to hold the photos of Rossiter, one by one, for the video camera. He does so, saying, ‘This is the man I knew as John Jones. He ran the show. It was his idea, everything. And fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.’

  That last part said with a mixture of anger and tears. Actual tears a-tremble in his eyes.

  Fuck him? Rossiter-Jones? Actually, Michael Nugent, mate, your buddy Rossiter-Jones has fucked you up pretty well. Gave you a nice life for ten years, then dropped you in the shit so royally deep, so stinkily thick, that you’ll be staring at a prison wall for thirty years, minimum, and your only opportunity to taste freedom again will depend on a judge’s clemency and the dice-throw of your own genetic longevity.

  And despite what Nugent seems to think, he’s given us nothing that would allow us to secure a conviction on Rossiter. Nothing. A case of my-word-against-his. A case hopelessly short of even circumstantial proofs.

  But we don’t care. We don’t care. We don’t care. We don’t care.

  We pass the video straight from that Carmarthen interview room to Markus Hauke and Moritz Windfeder at the BKA. You needed evidence, buddies? You asked for actual tangible hard evidence that a person we suspect of being a bad guy is an A-grade, 24-carat, 140-degree proof Bad Guy? A murdering, kidnapping arsehole who destroys lives for cash?

  Okey-doke. Fair enough. Reasonable request. So here’s your evidence. Not courtroom quality, but it doesn’t need to be. Just a wholly credible accusation from an utterly credible source.

  We sent the video over to Hauke and Windfeder, together with the background material they needed to make sense of it. Within the day got back a note from Windfeder. ‘OK. Looks really great. We’ll talk to Legal.’

  Two days more, just two, and Windfeder gives us the thumbs-up. A big, friendly Alles in Ordnung from our partners across the sea.

  Our favourite maybe-conspirators don’t have any trips to Germany booked in the near future, but that’s fine. They’ll make their next trip soon enough and when they do, the very next time they get together in Aachen, or Dortmund, or Whereverthell, we will ask the Bundeskriminalamt to secure the necessary interception warrants. Audio, video, the lot. Hotel rooms. Restaurant. Meeting rooms. Cars. Everything.

  With luck and a following wind, our principal targets will gather by some quiet German lakeside. Will be attentively served by some softly murmuring Bavarian waitress. Will discuss their lethally criminal business over Kaffee and Torte and Apfelstrudel and Schlagsahne, as damselflies flit and and pond skaters skim the waters beyond.

  And all the time, unseen recorders will gather their conversation. They’ll be recorded in their restaurants and hotels. Quiet electronics will gather every word they say in their cars and on their phones. They will enjoy their weekend – pleasant, peaceful, productive – and fly back home so royally fucked that they won’t even know the scale of the shitstorm that is heading their way.

  Operation April isn’t formally reopened, but it doesn’t have to be. Jackson and Brattenbury will do what needs to be done. And Watkins and I have that savage jubilation. A maybe we’ll get those bastards one. And if that sounds more like a beginning than a place to end – well, those loping hares aren’t tidy about such things.

  But those things lie in my future.

  Today is mid-February. Valentine’s Day.

  Snowdrops and crocuses burst through the wet grass of Bute Park. Soft-nosed bombs of colour that rise through the damp earth and detonate softly under a new sun.

  Kay tells me she’s done up at Neil Williams’s place and invites me up there to take a look.

  I arrive to find a farm reborn. Stand outside in the softly moving air trying to work out what’s changed. Realise that a hedge, overgrown and shaggy with elder, has been cut back hard. It has the pale gleam of sawn wood, the fierce precision of a military buzz-cut. A broken piece of farm machinery has been towed away. A dung heap moved somewhere out of sight.

  And, in their place, light and air. A long view down the valley. The little humped bridge where the streams join. You can’t see the monastery from here but you can see the stubby tower of the village church shining in the half-sun.

  As I stand, the front door opens. Kay and Neil Williams step outside.

  Kay has already somewhat abandoned the super-professional look she first brought up here, her clicky heels surrendering to the reality of this farmyard. But there’s still a new maturity in her. An assurance in her own competence and professionalism.

  That assurance is entirely deserved. ‘Incredibly safe and boring’ might have been the brief and, yes, I can see Kay has avoided anything that might unduly challenge either Neil Williams or his as-yet-only-theoretical daughter. But the place has class. Into this middle-of-the-road palette of golds and creams and safe beiges, Kay has smuggled a little dazzle. A clear Perspex lamp base on what looks like a block of polished granite. Some jet-black curtain tie-backs that shouldn’t work, but really do.

  The same thing in the bathroom and Bethan’s bedroom, rooms that weren’t on the original brief but which Kay wanted to do and to whose overhaul Neil Williams quickly assented.

  ‘We might get going in the kitchen as well,’ says Williams, standing proudly next to his design guru. ‘We’ve had chats about it and if the budget is all OK, then . . .’

  Williams has changed too. He’s had a haircut. He’s shaved more carefully than he used to. No peeping curls of long, unshaven hair guarding the hollows under his jaw. His clothes are still emphatically rural. Tweed jacket worn over a dark-olive jumper, a check shirt and a somewhat notional tie. But the jacket looks new and the jumper looks freshly washed at the very least.

  I try to figure out if Kay has had a hand in those transformations too. Her face gives nothing away and I can’t work it out, but I suspect not. I think Neil Williams has located the change in himself. And it was surely him not Kay that arranged for the hedge to be cut, the dung to be moved.

  I think, What would Bethan see if she returned home today? What would she think if she came back and saw this? Saw this house and met this man.

  And she’d approve. I think she’d approve. I hope she’d have the wisdom to find some kind of meeting point between her father’s way of life and her own, more urban, ways. To forgive that old anger of his. To find a new beginning.

  Kay wants praise from me and I give it. I do check that she hasn’t spent too much money – Williams hardly has the earth to spend – but she reassures me. ‘I got everything I could at trade prices. A lot of the pieces came from eBay.’

  She did, I know, get a lot of help from Dad. Not directly, but the workmen Kay used were Dad’s guys up from Cardiff, who would never have dared be late, do a poor job, or overcharge. If Kay does this thing for a living sometime, she’ll need to work with trickier tradespeople, and less-obliging clients. But as a start? As a first toe into the waters of that whole adult world of earning money, getting on? She’s done one hell of a job and I tell her so.

  This day, however, belongs not to Kay but to Neil Williams and me.

  I say, ‘Mr Williams, I think we’re ready.’

  He pats his pockets, finds a car key, checks the kitchen, looks anxious.

  ‘You’re fine,
Mr Williams, you’re just fine.’

  We get into his car, a Toyota pick-up. He puts the key into the ignition, but doesn’t turn it.

  ‘No promises, Mr Williams. I can’t make any promises at all.’

  He nods. Acknowledges the bargain.

  He drives us as far as Exeter, where we stop for fuel and coffee for him, peppermint tea for me.

  ‘Thing is,’ he says. ‘When Bethan was small, I was always hard at it. Making my way, you know. Establishing myself. Sometimes, if I came home and I’d been working all day and things weren’t like I pictured they ought to be in my head, I’d get snappy. It wasn’t anything really, but it probably felt that way to Jo and Bethan. Bethan especially, I think. You know, she’s not like me. Not . . .’

  He’s said all that before and I tell him he’s fine. He’s doing fine. When we get back to the car, I take the key. Drive on south.

  I’ve already told Williams that Len Roberts, far from raping and killing his daughter, saved and protected her. Kept his silence these eight long years, to defend her and save her from harm.

  The day I told him that, he stared at me. Said nothing, except that his eyes were bright and full of matter. Then he strode out of the house and down the hill to Roberts’s shack, a determination to do right bulging in his jaw.

  I’ve not seen Roberts since, but I’m sure that wild man will do just fine. He and Judy. The two of them together.

  At Newton Abbot, I notice that Williams is starting to get self-conscious about his car. It looks fine to me – country cars are allowed their mud – but I stop off at a car valeting place and we wait as a couple of lads wash the car inside and out, polishing hub caps whose sheen won’t last a moment back on the roads of upland Powys. I go into the garage and buy three packets of tulips. Fresh yellow heads, the colour of butter, the colour of sunlight. Rip away the cellophane and elastic bands. Assemble them into a simple bunch.

  I hand them to Williams and we climb back into a car that smells like breath mints and loo cleaner.